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fragMasterFlash writes with this excerpt from SemiAccurate:
'In a really pathetic display, Nvidia actually faked the introduction of its latest video card, because it simply doesn't have boards to show. Why? Because it didn't get enough parts to properly bring them up, much less make demo boards. ... Notice that the three screws that hold the end plate on are, well, generic wood screws. Large flat -head Phillips screws. Home Depot-grade screws that don't even sit flush. If a card is real, you hold it on with the bolts on either side of the DVI connector. Go look at any GPU you have; do you see wood screws that don't mount flush or DVI flanking bolts? ... If you look at the back of the fake Fermi, [from this PC Watch picture], you can see that the expected DVI connector wires are not there, just solder-filled holes. No stubs, no tool marks from where they would be cut out. Basically, the DVI port isn't connected to anything with solder, so they had to use screws on the plate."

Exactly. What is the point of this "news" anyway? Lots of times companies build something that looks kinda like the product but isn't it. This was same with Wii on E3 too before it was released. It wasn't the actual Wii at all.

The purpose is to show off their new products that are coming. Sure, they could you just have a paper that lists the features. But as people are physically there, they might like to see something too. If it's not fully build yet, they have to make up a prototype to show. It doesn't really change anything with the product - when it gets out, reviewers will tell if it sucks then.

The second I saw NVidia articles I knew that this was just a PR thing just so that people don't forget about them after ATI's launch. I knew their product wasn't finished and they had to show *something* in development, but c'mon, you have to admit this is pretty funny. I mean--wooden screws and boards!

What are you, stupid? The question you should be asking is, what's the point of showing a fake product, if not to deceive? There isn't one. If it was intended as an artist's interpretation of a future product, they could have just said so. Clearly this is part of a false advertising campaign to promote their product, and make it seem like they're ahead of rivals when in fact they still have plenty of work to do.

Because products in development are never like the final versions. That is because they are in development. But people in these conferences like to see something physical, so its better to make up something that looks like the final product along with telling about the features.

If the upcoming product shown in these conferences would be the final version, why aren't they selling it already?

Of course they do, but why do you think that is? Because they're just dumb punters who like physical objects, even if they're fakes? Or because they actually care about seeing the REAL stage of production, the effort going in, the technical hurdles, seeing the real product before it hits the shelves, etc.? You don't lie to people just because you know they want to hear it.

So if I go to amazon and pre-order one of these based on the performance, only to find they can't actually mass produce them as valid PCI cards, that's fine? Right. It's false advertising, pure and simple.

I'm not talking about legality, I'm talking about morality. Legality is the last refuge of people who don't care about ethics. As for your "question about the concept automobile"... that's because I didn't care to read that much of your response. But no, I don't think that there's a problem showing a concept vehicle, because it's labelled as such.

The original CD player comes to mind. They demoed it as a small elegant device on the desk, hardly bigger than the actual CD. Under the table, hidden by the tablecloth, were the hulking electronics. But they knew that miniaturisation of the electronics would be just a matter of time and they wanted to show what the system could be.

NVIDIA are quite a way behind in the next generation race (time-wise, not tech-wise), and they had to try and make it look like they were a month or two away from having product availability. This fakery just makes the late Q1 2010 rumours sound more likely...

You don't generally call attention to the fact that a mock-up is, in fact, a mock-up. That would defeat the purpose of having it in the first place. They are still going to produce real cards, showing a mock-up doesn't negate that fact. As was said earlier, the article is fanboy crap.

Whoever modded this troll didn't read TFA. It is pure unadultered fanboy bullshit that shouldn't even qualify for the Slashdot idle section. The page is also littered with AMD/ATI ads. The article is the troll here.

Why not count the number of times he was right, divide that by the total number of articles? You could also multiply that by the fraction of text on the page that doesn't read like something from rense.com, and compare the resulting number to a similar calculation on other sites?

Using that view, I think I'll stick with AnandTech [anandtech.com], who was saying Q1 and pointing out that it was late for this generation anyway.

Yea, those are some pretty outlandish conclusions to jump to based simply on the shape of 3 screw heads and a white speck in a blurry low-res photo.

I mean, I'm sure that a tech company as large as Nvidia would have a few extra flush-mounting screws around amongst their huge stocks of video cards. If they really wanted to convincingly fake a real video card, I doubt they'd go to Home Depot to buy some "wood screws" instead of just ordering one from their warehouse or even just pulling a few screws out of a p

NVIDIA are quite a way behind in the next generation race (time-wise, not tech-wise), and they had to try and make it look like they were a month or two away from having product availability. This fakery just makes the late Q1 2010 rumours sound more likely...

You're right about NVidia claiming it was real

FTA: Note 1: Nvidia PR was asked to comment on the faked cards earlier this evening. Their reply was, "I'm glad you're asking us before you write. That statement is false. The product that we displayed was an actual Fermi board. The demo ran on Fermi silicon." We do not believe all of that statement.

I'm willing to give NVidia the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes hardware engineering samples are all hacked together like you wouldn't believe to get the first

I dunno. I worked for companies that demonstrated fake products. Well not exactly fake - we had working hardware and software, just that the working hardware was a big mass of board and didn't fit in the box and we still didn't have the CPU power to get more than about 60% of the performance we were supposed to get.

Now we went to great lengths to fake things at the trade show so we could keep the project going. I actually like the idea of tabloid hacks poking around and uncovering tricks like this, it keeps people honest.

Those original prototype Amigas (with the 5.25" drives and the expansion chimney) were in metal cases, not wooden. These generally had the older chips, Portia instead of Paula, Daphne instead of Denise, as I recall.

This is a natural part of product development... final, consumer-ready products don't spring to life fully borne, and in the case of something like the Amiga, the developer's units (which only went out to a handful of developers) were designed to get hardware into hands as quickly as possible, ra

I've seen lots of companies do that (defence companies, medical prosthetics). The defence companies would have a prototype system that would consist of rack mounted circuitboards, then they would repackage everything into a single ASIC chip within six months. The medical companies made artificial hands which had an external circuit board controller that was packaged into a shielded box along with a battery pack belt. That was reduced down to a chip and battery that went into the wrist of the prosthetic hand

This is actually a lot more common than you might think. Lots of tech shows (whether it's cell phones, computer parts, etc) bring "fake" models in. Sometimes it's just the production case with weights in. Sometimes, when a device needs to be outputting video, what you see is just a movie being played as opposed to its actual output.

Recently, netbook manufacturers have been caught doing it. During shows, you can see some brand new, thin and light netbook with a sign as "display model only". When show-goers pick it up, they see empty holes where USB, power, and ethernet connections should be. All that's there is a LCD, a keyboard, and a plastic shell.

Agreed. Speaking as an Engineer who has worked on hardware between first manufacture and first sale, this is no big deal. Prototypes are expensive, and usually not pretty. And you just don't let the folks in marketing (or the executives) touch your prototypes - you usually don't have enough to use yourself, much less to loan out for a few days, and risk getting broken at the hands of photographers and the like who don't take proper precautions in handling the boards. Not to mention, they look pretty ugly -

Having built many a prototype board in my day I can tell you I have utilized all manner of odds and ends including not only wood screws but wood as well - I don't think it means the card is a fake, it may be an engineering prototype or a software development board or whatever. I personally don't see anything in the photos that screams to me "FAKE" !

Exactly my thoughts. And according to a fudzilla article linked above, this basically what happened. The actual "product" is an engineering build and not something they want a PR guy waving around so they gave him a mock-up of it.

Personally, I don't give a damn what their hype machine has to say about anything. When they get silicon in production and I can "reasonably" expect to get it physically in-hand, then I'll start paying attention... Served me well for "waiting" on Duke Nukem Forever.:p

Just on a point of information, the "PR drone" was actually Jen-Hsun Huang, company president and CEO. If the card he was waving around was a mockup, he surely knew about it.

Not that I see that it matters. Huang openly admitted they're at least "a few months" away from production, and it was strongly implied at the press conference that GeForce models would come before Quadro and Tesla (lots of airy talk about high-end customers running to different cycles). It was a cute spot that this was, most likely, no

The end of the motherboard was roughly dremmelled off to match the fan enclosure (that is surely the designed fan enclosure for the card). The power connectors were glued on, and didn't match the solder pads for said connectors (indeed one was mostly sawed off).

Prototype? No. This card can't work.Blatant fake presented as a working board? Yes.Back-pedalling and claiming it is a mock up after the fact? Yes.

The point is that noone could really make themselves care that they showed a mock-up rather than the real product. When they hook it to a monitor and claim that they're showing it in action, THEN I'll give a rat's ass about the hardware in their silly little hands. THEN maybe you'll see outrage if they use a fake. This is, as described above, a non-issue.
All this ado over nothing makes me wonder if ATI doesn't have an astroturfing campaign going on or something.
(disclosure: I use ATI cards, mostly)

NVidia just kicked a hornet's nest the other day by not allowing their cards to run as a physics accelerator unless another of theirs was used as the display adapter. That is my guess as to why people are getting worked up over this.

Well, as TFS (yeah, that's right, you didn't even read that!) states, the DVI connector is not actually connected! So it can't actually display anything. Which by definition means, it's no a working graphics card. Which is another way of saying that it's FAKE.:)

Notice the source. The site semi accurate is run by a guy, Charlie Demerjian, who was fired from The Inquirer for a number of reasons, including making shit up. In particular, this guy has it in for nVidia. I don't remember the details of why he has it in for them, I think they cut him out of the information loop because he leaked some info he wasn't supposed to. Regardless, he hates nVidia and does everything he can to make them look bad. In his case, that includes just straight out making shit up.

So that's why he's making such a big deal of this being a fake. He wants it to be fake because, well I dunno, I guess that is somehow a "win" in his mind.

Personally I find it funny since companies do mockups for demonstrations all the time. Wouldn't at all surprise me if the card he was holding was such a mockup.

At any rate as with most things in life, you want to check sources, and on the Internet that is doubly true. Some people have an agenda to push and will... modify, to put it mildly, the truth to suit their needs. I though we'd all be well aware of that after all the political BS of recent years:P.

Just because it wasn't NDA'd doesn't mean he was supposed to reveal it. There is a little thing called "honor" and some people in the world still have it and assume others do as well. For example some time ago I was e-mailing back and forth with a guy from SVSound. He decided to let me know about a new upcoming product that wasn't public information yet (their surround speakers, which were announced on their news page a month ago). He asked me to please not go posting it on forums at that time, until they a

You know, I had noticed a very anti-nVidia bias from the Inquirer before and once I saw your post I realized I hadn't seen any of that sort of thing for a while. Good post. As a disinterested observer I'll confirm that The Inquirer definitely has (had?) it in for nVidia for some reason.

Charlie is known for being divulging information about the NVIDIA graphics chip manufacturing defect [arstechnica.com] that affected Dell, HP, Apple and others. NVIDIA kept claiming there was no defect until the hardware manufacturers put them in their place. Like someone else said here, The Inquirer did not sign NDAs, so NVIDIA did not cut him from anything.

I always found ATI cards work better for me (HTPC setups - I am not a gamer), however even I am not a "fanboi", so I can easily see Charlie's strong bias. It is not that he makes up facts, as far as I have seen, he bases his articles on information that turns out to be true or mostly true. However, he blows things way out of proportion, and his sarcastic style of writing is most definitely not proper for journalistic use.

As soon as I saw 'Fudzilla' and 'nVidia' in the same sentence, I knew it was going to be a bucket of accusations. From the moment nVidia released the GTX295, I've noticed their articles always have a tag about nVidia being shitty or deceptive in some manner.

At first, I thought he was an ATI fanboy, but from other comments I've seen, I don't think he cares all that much about hardware performance as attempting to stick it to companies he doesn't exactly care for.

Getting fired from The Inquirer for playing fast and loose with the truth is like getting kicked out Atilla's horde for being a little TOO good at raping and pillaging. Kind of impressive, in a disturbing way.

After going through three months of bullshit involving one GTX 285 and two 8800GTs both coughing up black screens due to shoddy engineering and shoddy driver development, plus an HP laptop with an nVidia GPU taking a shit barely a year prior, I want to see nVidia fail, but for some very specific and legitimate reasons. As in I generally can't understand how hype and brand loyalty can sustain a company through multiple fuckups with nobody to blame but themselves. Even the Republican Party has fallen on hard

Those do not look like wood screws to me. not even close. They appear way too small and they dont appear to be counter sunk. Go to lowes and see if you can find any wood screws that match. They do remind me of the ones used to mount motherboards or for mounting 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 drives. And my geforce 7800 gtx has those stand offs with both dvi connectors. I didnt realize that was novel.

I have to agree. I don't see wood screws. What I do see is wide head machine screws holding the backplate to the assembly. Maybe it's because I work in a shop that only manufacture electronics for a specific mission, but I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Much less anything worthy of the hyperbole and sensationalism coming from this article...

I do think that some assembly parts may not fit well or are meant for a different product which could explain the bad fit and finish. Anyway seems like a non-story to me..

Yeah, I never saw wood screws with a rounded head on them like that. Not to mention chrom dipped. I mean, if you were going to go to the trouble of chrome dipping some wood screws you sanded down to look like machine screws, you really have to be diabolical in all the wrong ways.

That was my thought. These look like self-tapping machine screws, w/30-45 offset at the head for pulling sheet metal into a offset groove for panel mounting(read: need a impact screwdriver to use properly or bevel punch). You can get chrome woodscrews, they're rare as anything(defeats the purpose of hiding them in case a plug fallout when putting wood furniture together), much easier to find sheet metal screws, or self-tapping metal of the same type.

You'd think a company like Nvidia would be a bit more careful given their CEO's penchant for bold claims and harping on any perceived gaffe by competitors.

I suspect this "announcement" was very rushed after AMD's recent announcement of their new DirectX 11 part that seems to outperform anything Nvidia has out at the moment and at a lower price point. Combine that with Intel's snub on producing chipsets for new/relevant PC platforms and one can imagine that Nvidia was anxious to appear competitive. Nvidia is in for a VERY tough slog.

Well, it's not like nvidia just found out ATI was about to release a DX11 card. They are both sticking to long-standing roadmaps and there's not really anything to be surprised about.

I don't think anyone is in a panic. Nvidia's GT200 line is still viable and there's no reason to rush out and upgrade until there are at least two manufacturers selling DX11 cards. Hell, there's no reason to buy DX11 support prior to DX11 actually being supported by anything. I recall rushing out to buy a DX9 card to get it ear

In reality, they'll end up making more money off whatever big whitebox maker picks their low-end business class cards for their cheap desktops than their cutting edge products.

Which is why I'll be very surprised, and unpleasantly so, if nVidia comes out ahead of any situation better than filing for bankruptcy protection, seeing as they burned many of the bridges they had with OEMs and their suppliers back during the whole bumpgate scandal with TSMC, Dell and HP. Especially with a cheap competitor like ATI

So the biggest complaint FTFA is the improvised/hobbiest/hurried/hasty assembly from Nvidia to make it for conference presentation? I'd say in the end it's still the card, it got demo'd and who cares. It'd be a different story if it was shipped out to the public consumer market that way, otherwise I wouldn't have a problem using it as long as it performed. Duct-tape Engineering at it's finest and it got Nvidia through their conference. I applaud. All that oppose, go cash your/. geek card in at the scr

This type of reporting is, in my opinion, one of the best things that have come out of the communication acceleration we have gone through. While many people here are already aware of these practices there many that aren't yet. This is the best weapon we have against the consumer manipulation that has been going on since WWII. I'm not saying that NVIDIA is a bad company, everyone does this, all we need is awareness about it.

The author is apparently not that familiar with screws. "Not being countersunk" has little to do with what type of screw something is. Neither does being a "wood screw" have much to do with bing flush with a surface. It has to do with the screw being "pan-head", and whether the surface has been drilled to allow the screw to fit into it. (That's the 'counter-sunk' part.)

To see if it's a "wood screw", a "machine screw", or a "sheet metal screw", you'd have to see the threads and especially the tip. Wood screws have broadly gapped threads, and a sharp tip, and generally a bit of a taper along their length to the point, designed to gouge themselves into the wood as you screw in but without splitting the wood. Sheet metal screws have closer spaced threads, a sharp tip, and much less taper or none: they're used to screw into soft metal like aluminum and gouge their way in, but you generally have to pre-drill a hole for them. Machine screws have closely spaced threads, no taper, no sharp tip, and require the hole to be pre-threaded to work.

Counter-sinking takes time and a bit of skill to get just right without overdrilling and making the case weak. Merely tapping, or pre-threading is quicker: I can easily believe that a prototype would not be countersunk.

You are correct. It's gratifying to see people that know something about hardware around here. I agree, those look like machine screws that have a place in the screw kits for working on computers. Either stainless or more likely, plated. I don't recall seeing a head for wood screw that looks like that.

Some of the things NVidia did on their "working board" include: covering the SLI connector, not having the DVI connector wires go through vias, place the PCI-E power connectors wrong from where the board shows they should be, cut off the end of the board with a saw right though where there was more stuff, have half the vents on the back of the card completely blocked...

This isn't just "they used the wrong screws", this is "total fake that couldn't possibly work". Saying it was a working board was a total lie.

This isn't just "they used the wrong screws", this is "total fake that couldn't possibly work". Saying it was a working board was a total lie.

Meh, they didn't say that was a working board. They said the demo ran off a working board. No real value in playing show and tell with the real engineering samples, as they probably look less like a real card at this point than the mockup does.

The reason he bothered to correct the summary so well was because the summary spent so much time screaming "OMG WOOD SCREWZ!!!"

Also, you are correct: claiming that what was pictured is a working board would be a total lie. As such, the article's author really shouldn't be stating that nvidia claimed that item was a working board, since they had another term for it: "mockup."

In short, the author has an axe to grind with nvidia, and is looking for anything he can to make them look bad. In this case, making sh

Little things matter. When designing hardware, when building software, getting those little details right helps prevent errors and failures later on. The ranting about the wood screws dominated the original post: failing to correct that would help make anyone else who repeated the rant look like, well, like someone who shouldn't be trusted with a screwdriver.

Getting those details right can help your credibility quite a lot when you fill out a bug report, a blog, or even a letter to family.

The screws just look like the screws you need use for hard drives. Wood screws are normally galvanized or black in color. As for the underside connection points, who knows how things are held together on the inside...or they faked it. Pics of the inside or its not a fake I say.

I'm sorry, but this screws in the end plate are not wood screws. I work with wood on a regular basis and spent over a decade as a manufacturing engineer in electronics manufacturing. These screws are common assembly screws in electronics, not furniture. It is also common to leave off components on proto, demo or even production PCAs. Many circuits are designed to be partially populated using a single board with various levels of features. As far as "First Silicon" is concerned, if a chip is working to spec, there is no reason not to use it. While this may not be a production board (I have no way of knowing), it could be a working prototype. I'm beginning to think the writer is a bit of a drama queen.

Oh, and there's AMD/ATI adverts all over it. Who gives a fuck about nVidia using a mock up, companies do this all the time at tech shows. It's a non-issue! What is the issue is why an article from a site that is so obviously geared around slagging off nVidia was posted here.

What's up with all the decorative crap that goes into video card housings these days? It would be nice to be able to get high end hardware that isn't burdened with fluff designed to appeal to the minimally sapient crowd.

They look like some of the flattop panheads that I've got around here. The tops of these screws are like pancakes, flat top and bottom with slightly rounded sides. They look exactly like that. I've got some in both 6-32 and 3mm.

They look like some of the flattop panheads that I've got around here. The tops of these screws are like pancakes, flat top and bottom with slightly rounded sides. They look exactly like that. I've got some in both 6-32 and 3mm.

Rather more tellingly, they look like the screws that are holding my motherboard to my case.

In all seriousity, you speak a bitter truth. My Nvidia 8600GT recently died, so I replaced it with an ATI Radeon 4770, as phoronix had raving reviews about good linux performance. Now the drivers for it have killed my linux completely, black screen with artefacts replaces the login screen and I can't rescue it from a login shell because ubuntu disabled the root password. Rather pathetic that they didn't account for the removal by implementing the option to log in with your normal username (I'm talking about

Dear GP: If that's the case, try sticking a "2" on the end of your boot params (ie. select the line, hit e, edit the line with the mention of/boot on it, and add a " 2" to the end, then hit b to boot).

You don't need to log in to run level 1. You are already in. Edit the kernel parameters by adding 1 to the end. Do this from the grub screen before booting the desired kernel . It's called single user mode. Or follow this. [ubuntu.com]

Now the drivers for it have killed my linux completely, black screen with artefacts replaces the login screen and I can't rescue it from a login shell because ubuntu disabled the root password. Rather pathetic that they didn't account for the removal by implementing the option to log in with your normal username (I'm talking about in the recovery mode shell-login here)

There's got to be something you can do to rescue it, surely - at least to the point where a full reinstall is not necessary. livecd?